After trying to disrupt the event with chants, shouts of “racist,” and a banner stretched across the classroom at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill where former congressman Tom Tancredo was speaking against amnesty and in-state tuition for illegal aliens, a mob of “students” and “teachers” finally smashed open the window of the room, and campus police escorted Tancredo away to protect his safety.

“We’re very sorry that former Congressman Tancredo wasn’t able to speak,” Chancellor Holden Thorp said in a prepared statement. “We pride ourselves on being a place where all points of view can be expressed and heard, so I’m disappointed that didn’t happen tonight. I think our Public Safety officers appropriately handled a difficult situation.”

Students use mob violence to stop a speech on your campus, and you’re VERY SORRY? You’re DISAPPOINTED? That’s it? You’re not angry? You’re not outraged? You’re not going to expel or even mildly punish the “students” who did this?

You “pride” yourself on being a university where all views are heard, but when violence is used to prevent a view from being heard, you’re … disappointed?

In a variety of ways, we seem to be re-living the 1920s and 1930s. Remember that many German universities were on the side of the Nazis. Though Chancellor Thorp’s response is more directly reminiscent of Cornell University’s cowardly response to violent black protesters in 1969.

Today’s liberalism is typified by the campaign to destroy America from without, via open immigration, and from within, by homosexual “marriage.” And, not by coincidence, those are the two issues on which the left and liberals are now using coercion and violence to silence the other side. Then there are those legions of liberals who say they oppose coercion and violence, but never do anything to stop them, and barely condemn them.

See this, this, this and this, all posted at VFR in the last couple of days, on official coercion. including criminal penalties for “hate,” being employed against opponents of same-sex “marriage.” See immigration reformer Stephen Steinlight of the Center for Immigration Studies on how the “Progress by Pesach” open borders movement (which I wrote about here) is preventing him from speaking against the movement before Jewish organizations.

Here is an eight-minute video of the UNC event. Here and here are written accounts from the website of Americans for Legal Immigration Political Action Committee (“ALIPAC”). ALIPAC’s account is taken, without citation or link, from the original article which appears in today’s Charlotte News-Observer. I found the latter by Googling some text in the Chancellor’s statement quoted in ALIPAC’s article.

—end of initial entry—

LA writes:

Here’s the AP’s lead on the story, which casts the event as a violent attack by police on students because the latter were “upset”:

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill police used pepper spray on student protesters upset that former Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo was speaking at the school.

What a rotten, evil country this is. Students are upset, so police attack them with pepper spray.

LA writes:

I was wondering if ALIPAC’s and the News-Observer’s quotation of Chancellor Thorp’s statement had left out any promise of punishment of the protesters, but haven’t found a more complete quotation of the statement. I don’t see the statement at Thorp’s official webpage.

Here is his contact information:

chancellor@unc.edu
Phone: (919) 962-1365
Fax: (919) 962-1647

Charles T. writes:

Liberals are good at this type of thing. I am sure most of them believe that in order to protect their lofty concept of tolerance they must at times be intolerant. The liberals always find a way to justify politically-inspired violence against their opponents.

Therefore, one must conclude that reasoning with people and movments like this is not possible. The proper use of force has to be used against them in the form of government and police power to allow others to exercise their political freedoms the Constitution is supposed to afford every citizen. However, if the government does not protect the rights of people opposed by the brownshirts, what are we to do?

LA replies:

Never, never accept it, in the hope and faith that eventually true order and true freedom will be restored. There have been tyrannies throughout history, and they don’t last. However, before they come to an end, they can destroy a society. Our civilization was gravely damaged by and is still suffering grievously from the effects of Hitlerism and Communism. And liberalism, as Malcolm Muggeridge said, may well turn out to be even more destructive than either of those. And Muggeridge said that before the modern liberal ideology of non-discrimination, which is much more radical and destructive than previous forms of liberalism, had become ascendant.

Charles T. replies:

LA wrote: “Never, never accept it, in the hope and faith that eventually true order and true freedom will be restored. ” Agreed. A thousand times over. This has to be our motto. We only lose when we give up. We win as long as we keep trying.

The brownshirts: Never was a movement more appropriately named.

VFR reader Blake Dunlop has forwarded this:

Dear Chancellor Thorp:

In an episode that could have been taken straight from the 1930s in Germany, a troop of apprentice thugs, presumably many of them students from your campus, interrupted and shut down a speech, concerning an important matter of public policy, on your campus by a former U.S. Congressman.

Your reaction? You’re “very sorry” and “disappointed.”

How dynamic and decisive of you, to react so powerfully! Surely you’ve quenched any possibility of further such unpleasantries at UNC Chapel Hill. Yes, you’ve taught those brownshirts a lesson they’ll not soon forget.

Sincerely,

Blake Dunlop
Bozeman, Montana

LA replies:

I think we should be grateful to Chancellor Thorp for providing a perfect template which modern, enlightened Western leaders can use for responding to social disruptions and disasters of various kinds.

For example, here is the way President George W. Bush, following Thorp, would have addressed the nation on September 11, 2001:

We pride ourselves on being a country where our citizens can go about their daily business in physical safety, free of the fear of being mass murdered by foreign fanatics on American soil, so I’m disappointed that didn’t happen this morning. I think our police officers and other first responders appropriately handled a difficult situation.

Here’s Franklin Roosevelt, addressing the Congress on December 8, 1941:

December 7, 1941, a day that will live—in disappointment.

Laura G. writes:

This occurred at the formerly great university that is just around the corner from me, and it was just as you say … student and faculty brown-shirted totalitarian thugs. An entitled mob, a limp administration, a dithering response. Anyone who isn’t contemplating the German experience of the 1930s is purposely self-deluding. The facts are widely available for all who wish to contemplate the abyss that is now at our very own feet.

David Levin writes:

Thanks so much for this. I hadn’t heard about the Tancredo incident. That is unfortunate. Reminiscent of Jim Gilchrist’s attempt to speak at Columbia some years ago … The only thing missing was a “Don’t tase me, bro!” idiot! Conservatives should be angry at Tancredo for recently taking the Libertarian position on legalizing illicit drugs. Yet, you don’t see conservative groups and activists breaking windows and trying to prevent Tancredo from speaking.

That Jewish groups (the Progress by Pessach coalition) are getting behind Federal lawbreakers (illegal aliens) and silencing critics like Stephen Steinlight saddens me. Where, I ask, are the “law and order” American Jews, those who want to see our laws enforced and who want a halt to the Invasion of the Homeland that has gone on since 1965 but which increased greatly after the 1986 Amnesty? Are they so afraid of or tied to the anti-America legal groups the SPLC and the ACLU that they can’t think straight? Don’t they understand the camel’s nose concept, the idea that if you allow lawbreaking in one area of the country you have to allow it in another? And those Sanctuary Cities that are operating against Federal law … Why haven’t the Mayors and Police Chiefs of those cities been brought up on Federal violations of aiding and abetting?

Without the rule of law and the enforcement of those laws, you have anarchy. Anarchy exists today in many U.S. cities because illegal alien gang members—perhaps a third to two-thirds of the one million gang members in the U.S. (see this pdf) have taken over entire areas of these cities (Pacoima and Canoga Park in Los Angeles, to name a few) and have Americans and legal aliens in those cities living in fear because the insane edict Special Order 40 is still in place, keeping the police from asking about a person’s immigration status, etc. There is also fear in the City management that cracking down on illegals will bring lawsuits for big bucks against these cities. Do these Jewish groups supporting illegal aliens want anarchy? They must. They can’t all be ignorant or stupid! Supporting lawbreaking at ANY level—and at least 25 Americans per day die at the hands of illegal aliens—is insane and indicates to me that some American Jews are disloyal to the United States. If that sounds outrageous, so be it. Of all ethnic groups in the U.S., Jewish Americans should be strong on law and order, like Rabbi Daniel Greer of New Haven, CT. Yet people like Rabbi Greer are marginalized and seen as freaks instead of as heroes—“just another example” (as radio talk show host Michael Savage often says) “of the mental illness called liberalism.”

A reader writes:

You backed away somewhat from your brownshirts comparison and said that the Cornell comparison was closer. But I think brownshirts is closer to the truth. When you have organized groups of thugs invading a room and stopping a speech, that is what the brownshirts did. The Nazis used violence to break up the meetings of their political opponents. At Cornell, black protesters occupied university buildings.

LA replies:

Excellent point.

David B. writes:

The story about “student protestors” attacking Tom Tancredo is just what Herbert Marcuse told his acolytes to do in the 1960s. Marcuse claimed that America’s freedom of speech was a fraud, calling it “reprssive tolerance,” and he called for shouting down anyone you disagree with.

Marcuse was convinced that America was becoming another Third Reich.

Anthony Damato writes:

One of the White female student brownshirst was holding a sign that read “Western Civilization Killed my Ancestors”.